PLC-learning about students' understanding

 [possible communication to level leaders for tmrw?  PLCs in Action

How can we learn more about students’ understanding of sentences?

We wanted to find out more about students’ understanding of sentence structure. So we designed a set of 20 simple multiple-choice questions to try and shed some light on why students make these kinds of errors. Here are two questions from the set.

These two questions are examples of the way that two questions targeting the same concept can still have very different challenges - something we have written about before. Both questions are structurally quite similar, in that they are testing student understanding of sentence fragments. But despite this structural similarity, the surface features make a big difference. Students find one question very easy, and one much harder. In our first trial of these two questions, with a couple of thousand Year 5 students in England, 91% got the first question right but only 13% got the second one right.

Why is there such a big discrepancy? We think that students don’t understand what makes a sentence, and instead focus on surface features - in this case, sentence length. The correct answer to option 5 looks like it is about the right length, and all the other options are very short. But in question 6, sentence length leads students astray. The correct answer is very short, and students therefore don’t think it can be a sentence.